Are people relieved when they learn that humans (including them) will not be extinct in 18 months? Surprisingly not. Instead of relief, many vigorously attack any opposing view, and cling to their end-of-days worldview.

I delve into this deeper, examining Pros & Cons of having this view & elaborate on timescales from geological to human. Perhaps folk that defend extinction scenarios want it to happen? That could explain their opposition to any and all types of action to prevent it?

Most importantly, ask questions. Many questions…

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About paulbeckwith

Well known climate science educator; Part-time Geography professor (climatology, oceanography, environmental issues), University of Ottawa. Physicist. Engineer. Master's Degree in Science in Laser Optics, Bachelors of Engineering, in Engineering Physics. Won Association of Professional Engineers of Ontario gold medal. Also interested in investment and start-ups in climate solutions, renewable energy and energy efficiency. Avid chess player, and likes restoring old homes. Married with children.

15 Responses to Questioning Human Extinction Worldviews

Sometimes a man knows things based in a gut feeling is the truth and scares the crap out of him.
Extinction is a reset, has been a reset, and will be comming again. That’s the nature of things.
As far as some wishing for it.
I question where we are as humans. We are far off the path of past hopes and dreams.
We are not above The checks and balances of nature.
Our living APPART from our planet, trying to cleanse off the unwanted soil and dirt of our natural existence once balanced with nature, has doomed us to our demise.
To think we could escape the reality of nature by living separate and appart was a fools dream.
For all to know , We are nature, to elevate above, to control, manipulate , we have doomed ourselves.
So yes I believe the human has failed.
Failed to accept, failed to conserve, and failed to live justly.
I would rather the earth pass into the reset then to doom the future children a life of Bing totally engineered from birth to death in a very un-natural bio engineered existence.
Gmo, war, hate, greed, pollution, false gods, geoengineered world, geoengineered people. sometimes you to have to put the sick dog to sleep.
We are there. I would never help to extend this nightmare.
From Eden to hell we have gone. We have ate from the tree of life and have committed all the sins hidden.
Nature has taken rock and turned it into living life. The top soil is the rotting corpses of nature past feeding the present. We disrespected the lives given to bring anew.
Now they come for us, no escaping for the foolish. Like a kite on a string she is reeling us back to the reality of the laws we abandoned.
Yup. It needs to be reset back to the foundation.

Paul you seem to have tacken the unscientific view that the only way to mass extinqsion is a metane burst. And the new paper on stored methane confirms your views. What about the 40+ feedbacks Guy mentions? You are a good man but a poor expose journalist. You write as if you are afraid for your job(s), surely you know the public has climate change on the back burner and methane release is only part of the puzzzle. Your answer as to how people are responding to you sounds like Trump yelling “fake news.”

Interesting. I wasn’t aware there [that there was…] a body of people who believe human extinction will occur as quickly as 18 months. As you indicate, there may be a sense of freedom in such fatalism. Being hopeful, I appreciate your science-based view that there is at least some room for hope. We can’t stop trying. Yet.

From a natural habitat perspective GM sees us as an extremely vulnerable species dependent on plants and species to support our continued existence. The species that support our lives physically and emotionally are being wiped out exponentially by the sixth mass great extinction. GM believes that very large methane eruptions will inevitably happen as Arctic sea ice retreats! There are astronomical gigatonnes of methane buried in the Siberian permafrost and in the shallow waters of the ESAS. which if released by a heating climate will up the global average temperature to a level we can’t grow grains hence the collapse of western civilisation!

I am a little disappointed in the intramural conflict between you and Guy McPherson. I follow both of you closely, and think you both have important things to say. Obviously Guy has treated you badly somewhere along the line; I get that.

I agree that even fast paced change is incremental and not instantaneous. I agree that there is a big difference between the collapse of civilization and the extinction of the human species. However the two of you are performing slightly different roles. You are a scientist and still conducting research; Guy is no longer conducting scientific research; he is a “popularizer” who is connecting dots.

Guy does seem given to hyperbole, but in actuality the two of you disagree about details, not the basic underlying problem. You both discuss exponential change and how the manifestation of such is only obvious in the rear view mirror.

You both clearly see the climate emergency upon us. In fact in the absence of geoengineering, your view while not as bleak as Guy’s is probably on the same end of the spectrum. The main difference between the two of you is that you are an optimist who believes that we still have time to get our body parts out of the ringer, whereas Guy does not believe that.

I just read Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Orestes and Eric Conway (excellent book if you haven’t already read it), and it distresses me to hear you make some of the same arguments made by tobacco, big oil, etc with respect to Guy.

I understand clearly that you disagree with him, but to say that he is crazy detracts from the overall struggle to get the word, the facts and implications on abrupt climate change out there.

I hope that the two of you
can agree to disagree, respect
each other’s viewpoint, and
continue doing the good work that
both of you are currently doing.

[
editor, dk. perfectly said. i truly like guy and sympathize greatly with his views. i find him to be honorable, credible, and quite sane. very sane, to my tastes. at the same time, i respect paul, trust not all but much of his science and assiduous engineering chops, and as a fellow serious chess player, respect his ability to see patterns in large scale if not also in great detail.

i come from an entire clan of teachers and engineers and find, at time, ‘their’ being so literal difficult, but from my family or origin know it so very, very well. so get the mind set. then, in college, cooper union had besides a very good art and architecture school what we called, ‘the engineering school’. so conventional at times despite great brilliance, back in the day, not at the level of MIT and stanford, but half a step behind. tuition free. lost the standard since then, but back then, was very much so…

paul and i have worked together well for 1.6 years. he has been kind, good, decent, fair, hard working.

i do not dismiss or relegate to a lower order his love of his wife and kids and cats. he is good. his heart does not always get to show, but i know it to be there of hundreds of interactions. many good. now and again, i am forced to challenge him, and he always listens to me, and might not always act, but will always listen. always. says a lot.

i support him not as a scientist but strong generalist ~ professional knowledge manager with wide communication skills–phone, data, web, social groups, strategy). since i am friends with both and even call guy time to time, its hard to watch and see. i find validity in both of them. you articulate this so well. thank you deeply, david
]

[[
addenda. i tell paul with great emphasis, live, not in email, ‘do not fight with guy or his people’ but grow his explication of science and engineering which he does far better than a great many so called PhD’s, excepting guy’s GREAT clear headed clarity, stay off policy and politics, and be who you are, an incredible teacher of basic science who can expound watts, kilograms, joules, ergs, watts, psi, psf, ph, physical and chemical and systemic properties better than many a (a times quite cowardly if not demonstrably weak) michael mann or james hansen, who while having great credentials if not gravitas and imprimatur, do not do as good a job of saying what is so, how it works, and likelihoods.

paul’s work has great value, but must get off the idea of being right or wrong but do what he does best, sharing i breath and, when practicable, in depth. as a wise friend, who read ALL of western philosophy in great detail, from wittgenstein to husserl to russell to ayer to sartre and mentored me in great detail extensively said, ‘david, much of western philosophy as we know it, would not exist without great self aggrandizement, and is based on a great confusion between truth and accuracy’.

to me, paul does not need to be true, just accurate. it is in sanskrit, ‘tat aum sat’, thou art that, to me, says it all: हरिः ओम् तत् सत्, Harihi Aum Tat Sat. things are suchness.
]]

Open letter to all you climate scientists–
Paul your a divorce.
I have gone down many rabbit holes and my plunge into climate has taken me to depths never reached.
I thank all of you who post the info regardless of how it’s taken. Truth is important.
I have been to detailed writings on how methane is studied. The complex system of measurements one many levels as to include side of bubbles, is complex and the scientists are determined in their work, honest, sincere human beings. Hats off to all of you and I bow.
You dig the rabbit holes for us to follow
Thanks Paul.
Rj.

I will say that Paul is still fighting the good fight. Guy seems to have given up hope. Opposite ends of the fight. Paul educates us more fully and warnings are clear. Guy seems to believe hope is a dirty word. And to drop out and enjoy the life left is ok. Selfish I think, and not helping his fellow man with current info. He made his living and was educated by the system that brought him to his conclusions and means to walk away. Ya selfish I would say. Hope the hut is happy!!
To us plain day to day citizens we are troubled with any in fighting. Like the different churches arguing over the same God. Causes apprehension, fear. Leads to dought and inaction.
Climate scientists need to really get togather share the info and have a summit to disclose the truths we face and fast. Flock the different governments, political pressure, and all other roadblocks. It’s your duty to humanity. -Rj

I think selfish is a word that implies that one can understand the thoughts of anothet without living their life. There are those that called the suicide of Michael Ruppert as selfish but had not lived his knowledge nor his disapointment. When it was said, ” He who is without sin cast the first stone,” I’m sure we were all included.

I am sure he still fights somewhat, I have been to his site weekly, not impressed.
And selfish is a light word. And judging is what we do every day in all expierences. It’s how you act on your deductions that matter.
I feel he could do a lot more and feel it’s owed to humanity when your knowledge can make a difference that is as important as our climate and its fate.

Perhaps in our society suicide is selfish, but most of what we all do is also selfish. I followed Michael Ruppert closely for a number of years. I think he saw the truth, and then could not cope with his grieving process. For those of us who listened to Ruppert, understood something of what he was about. Even though Ruppert is gone, those of us that have part of him in us, can continue his message ourselves in our own ways. In that sense Ruppert is still here.

With regard to human extinction, I think there has been some confusion. We are all going to die, and that was going to happen regardless of the existence of climate change. Our individual deaths are not the point at all. The death of civilization, our knowledge, our arts, our species is the point, and the moral burden of the death of our species is a much greater wrong, disaster, predicament, etc is much greater than the deaths of individuals, no matter the number of those individuals.

Guy McPherson went through his grieving process 10-11 years ago, and may have lasted several years. I know I grieved for at least a year when I realized that what I knew and understood about my country (US) was all B.S. However whenever I discuss that topic with someone, I must be sensitive to the fact that the other part of the conversation may not have grieved at all yet. So there will be resistance, and that is OK. Guy should also be sensitive to the differences of his audience in the degree of acceptance of just how much humans have screwed up this planet. Guy and Paul are both fighting the good fight; they both deserve heaps of credit. Perhaps Guy and Paul should give each other some credit; I am sure there are many who started listening to Guy, and ended up discovering Paul; just as there may be many who followed Paul, and ended up discovering Guy.

Questioning extinction; an idea. If half of the world’s super-computers were focused on finding an innovative way to remove carbon from the atmosphere, they would find the solution. A break-through like that would make all previous climate predictions invalid & they could stabilize the CO2 at 300ppm. Temperature and albedo is peripheral, because SRM & MCB can create ice age temp’s (in the short term). Current CDR in the scale and timeframe required is non-existent.

The insanity of srm. Is already apparent in nature. The nano aluminum with other toxins mixed wit coal fly ash ( now imported from China and others) is destroying the matrix of life, proven with all the info needed to know its a doomsday idea. Geoengineeringwatch.org (Dane wigington ) has all the info- patents of this massive program already happening. To suggest SMR is insane
The immune system of all life is affected, passing in humans the blood brain barrier and causing massive Alzheimer’s and dementia. All recerch funded by the aluminum companies, because they know what they are causing.
Prolonging the cover up, and dooming the fix that’s real.
Understand srm before wishing for it. Dane will set you straight.

agreed, i have followed this conversation and for the longest time thought these opinions far too extreme to be plausible….. it takes time to sink in… when i talk to most people i know they cannot accept this as even a remote possibility,but eventually reality settles in…

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Jet Stream Shift 17 degrees Southward to Greenland

Summary

Well known and respected creator of entertaining and comprehensible videos of sometimes daunting subjects, especially in climate system science, meteorology, oceanography and Earth Sciences at YouTube.
Frequently called upon for commentary by fellow educators, activists, and public. Physicist, Engineer, and part-time professor at the University of Ottawa. His primary interest is joining-the-dots on Abrupt Climate System Change to determine where we are heading, and how fast, and what it all means for us and our amazing planet.